Debian Weekly News - March 22nd, 1999

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian
developer community. It's been a week dominated by a few long threads
with vague conclusions, so there isn't too much to report on for this
week.

One of the most important things to happen this week is not even strictly
Debian related, but the project took interest in it as the guardians of the
DFSG and Open Source Definition. Apple has released the core of
Mac OS X Server under the
Apple Public Source
License. Their FAQ claims that "the Open Source Initiative has
determined that the Apple Public Source License conforms to the Open
Source Definition". Unfortunately, the license actually fails the
DFSG on
two counts. In response to this, Bruce Perens, Wichert Akkerman, and Ian
Jackson issued a joint statement
informing the community of the problem and asking Apple to fix their
license. This was
rebutted by Eric Raymond and OSI. To muddy the waters further, RMS
stepped in with more reasons the license is not free.

All Debian developers can now receive two free Debian 2.1 CDs from Linux
Central. You just have to send in a PGP signed email -- details here.

Richard Braakman has replaced Brian White as our release manager. The
announcement includes a summary of the release manager's powers and
duties.

Wichert Akkerman has released
revision 6 of his
Configuration Management specification.

Ian Jackson
proposedclosing debian-devel to postings from
non-developers. This could
half the volume of the list. In general, people agree that debian-devel
has too much volume, but disagree with Ian's analysis that non-developers are
the problem -- and have a large number of other ideas of their own.

Ian also
proposed "... a new Priority level distinction, which subdivides
Optional, such that most people will want to install all packages in the
better half' of old Optional." The idea was received
enthusiastically, the only question is what to call this new priority to
make people react to it in the desired way.

When does a document belong in Debian? The upload of The Anarchist FAQ
as a Debian package
raised this question. Opinions vary; some people think that
Debian should contain only documents that are computer related or those like
the bible-kjv package which have a special program to process them. Others
think the only important criteria is if a developer feels the document is
important enough to package. A very long thread developed, starting
here.

Steve McIntyre is
organizing a Debian get-together in the UK.
There seems to be a lot of interest. Another possible get-together
could happen in Germany sometime between today and the 26th.